Emotional eating is misunderstood and often unnecessarily demonized. However, emotional eating — that is, eating to feel good, often termed “compulsive eating” — isn’t the problem. It’s emotional overeating and mindless emotional eating that can be both psychologically and physically unhealthy. Emotional eating works as a coping strategy and stress reliever if approached with mindfulness and moderation.

Emotional Eating Is Inevitable

Whether you eat or overeat, whether you eat mindfully or mindlessly, one thing is clear: people only eat what they like to eat.  How a particular food tastes is a fundamentally emotional consideration. Let’s face it: your body doesn’t give a hoot whether you eat something that tastes good or not so good, as long as the food isn’t rotten. Taste  is the business of the mind — a matter of pleasure. Bottom line: Everyone eats for pleasure, so emotional eating is inevitable.

Some beat themselves up: “I just can’t stop eating. I am a food addict.” Nah! Andrew Weil and Winifred Rosen, in their 1983 book Chocolate to Morphine: Understanding Mind-Active Drugs place (as evidenced from the title) chocolate and morphine into one and the same broad category of drugs, explaining that humans have a seemingly innate interest in altering their consciousness.

Naturally, chocolate and morphine are in different leagues.  But the principle nevertheless holds: everything you eat is chemistry, i.e. drugs.  Anything you eat for pleasure alters your consciousness (from its baseline of boredom to a more pleasurable, i.e. more stimulated state).

So, ditch the word “addiction” from your vocabulary.  It means nothing.  Whether you are “addicted” to morphine or tiramisu, motivationally, you are a pleasure-seeker.  And fundamentally there is nothing wrong with seeking pleasure.  The path we take on this road of pleasure can be certainly more or less precarious, legal and illegal, socially sanctioned or socially stigmatizing, but the destination is always the same: wellbeing.

So, if you have labeled yourself as a food-addict, then I suggest you retire this psychologically toxic concept from your mind.  You are a seeker of wellbeing who is still mastering the learning curve of moderation.

resources: Mindful Eating Tracker

Deng Min-Dao wrote: “If you give the masters something to eat, they will eat.  If they have nothing to eat, they forget that there was ever such an activity” (1992, p. 224).  Hmm.  Masters of what?  Must be masters of self.  Hmm.  Why would a master of self be so nonchalant about eating?  Must be already full, I suspect.  Full of what?  That’s for you to figure out. 

Here are your choices:

a) full of self

b) full of dao

c) full of emptiness

d) all of the above

Good luck, eater.

Excerpt from Reinventing the Meal (2012, in press)

All life distinguishes “inside” from “outside,” i.e.  “self” from “non-self.” This is the fundamental duality (fundamental distinction, fundamental sapience/wisdom, fundamental bias) that all life operates on.  Life is self-serving, partial to self.  It views its own self as a subject and all else as “other,” as “environment,” as “objects.”  All life objectifies other life as “environment” (to use and to eat, and/or to flee from so as to not become used by it, so as to not be eaten by it).

All life is fundamentally unfair to other life, that is, until it enlightens to its inevitable interdependence and, on a higher level, to its essential sameness.

We begin with adaptively-intense dualism of self/non-self.  We start out in a highly self-centered (ego-centric) manner.  It makes sense: we are helpless and scared; so we have to think in a highly conservative manner.  This developmentally early us/them dualism is there to protect us.  We take no prisoners: the world is polarized into black and white.  “You are either with us or against us” is the mentality that underlies our socializing.  We socialize not for fun but for protection, we group into cliques, we circle the wagons.  We are busy surviving. 

Basavanna, a 12th century Virasaiva saint-poet wrote:

“The root is the mouth of the tree: pour water there at the bottom and, look, it sprouts green at the top.”

Animals – humans included – are, in essence, trees on wheels, trees on legs, we are mobile plant-life.  So, our root is on top, where the mouth is.  Pour in water up there, stuff that mouth up there with food and, look, body sprouts at the bottom.

Just like trees, we are living input/output tubes, only oriented differently, and on leg-wheels.  Mouth is the root, the root of all your bodymind growth.  You literally sprout from these very lips that kiss reality with every bite, from these two rows of teeth that mill the matter of reality into the consciousness that reads this sentence.

So, before you eat next time, notice your mouth.  Clench and relax your jaw, smack your lips, let your tongue maniacally sweep around its cavernous abode, chomp your matter-milling teeth.  Check the equipment of your growth.  Get rooted in the mouth.  Realize: this reality you are about to process is the very ground you sprout from.

Mindful Eating Tracker

Reference:  Speaking of Siva, A. K. Ramanjuan, 1973, p. 80

What: a protein bar for lunch

How: eyes closed, mind’s eye open

Experience: bewildering tai-chi-like dance of the tongue synchronized with washer-machine spin-cycle of the moving jaws, a mixing of crispiness and chewiness into a homogeneous swallow-ready mass, mind watching all this mouth-work and wondering “Am I really doing this, movement by movement, or is this happening on its own?” and answering itself: “Both.”

Share your mindful:

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To have a mindful eating moment, first, empty your mind.  Make room for presence.  Prime your hunger for an experience.  And then fill up on the moment. 

Mindfulness is not fullness of mind, but emptiness of mind.  Let your mind be as empty as a soup bowl before you fill it up with soup.  Remember: mindful eating is eating with an empty mind.  

Re-mind yourself to start your meals with an empty mind-bowl.  Empty your mind before you fill your stomach.   Or, put differently, open your mind before you open your mouth.

Mindful Eating Tracker

adapted from Eating the Moment

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Mindful eating is different things to different people.  To some, mindful eating is a weight management strategy.  To others, it’s a way to leverage more pleasure.  To some, eating mindfully is a way to pray.  For me, mindful eating is a way to meditate, a way to keep myself existentially awake and alive. 

Most of the time when I am eating I know this:

I am eating Earth (one part at a time) and I am becoming Earth (one moment at a time).  

What is mindful eating to you?  Share:

Mindful Eating Tracker

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Just had a chance to review Carmen Yuen’s “Cosmos in a Carrot” (on Amazon) and I thought the review itself makes a broader point that is of possible interest to a PsychCentral mindful eating reader.  So, here it is.

Mindful eating is one of my writing topics. So, you’d think, I really shouldn’t be supporting competition, so to say, but I don’t operate like that. If I like the book, of course, I am going to say so. So, I am researching for my next project and I stumble upon “Cosmos in a Carrot” by Carmen Yuen (Parallax Press,2006) and, after about an hour with it, I have this thought: if I had read this sooner, I, perhaps, would not have tried to publish my own mindful eating project, Eating the Moment (which originated back in 2000 but I didn’t get around to submitting the manuscript for publication until 2007, a year after “Cosmos in a Carrot” was written).